About what Sherlock figured out in The Sign of Three, and John doesn’t know it

 (Sherlock Meta by Loudest Subtext in Television)

xistentialangst said: [...] One question I had, though, was you mention that during the wedding speech, Sherlock realizes that John is bisexual. Can you explain further? I made a possible connection to "Hamish" being an analogy for a secret John kept about his sexual identity, that Irene knew, but is there more to it? If so, I must have missed it when it was going around [...]

Loudest Subtext in Television:

I’ve gotten a few questions about this, so I’ll just respond to them all more generally here.  I wrote about it a little here, but it was arranged around the use of Irene’s theme in the soundtrack, so I’ll explain it a different way.  Then I’ll talk more generally about why John’s bisexuality is something John is aware of and purposely lying about.

It is actually the realization that John was in love with Sherlock that makes Sherlock evaluate how he feels about that.  Sherlock determines he is in love with, and sexually attracted to, John in return.  If he hadn’t made that realization, the realization that he’s in love with John would not have happened.

Let’s look how The Sign of Three is set up:

In his speech, Sherlock recounts the stag night (where John got handsy with him) and the morning after when John said the Mayfly Man was going to great lengths to cheat… meaning sexless nights of connecting with people.  John apparently thinks being married is that boring.

Then Sherlock goes to toast their marriage, and the epiphany begins.  Mycroft walks him through someone who was lying about being in two groups at once and how all the things that make it look like that person is actually in two groups are not a coincidence.  Sherlock remembers John being jealous of Irene — “if you’re looking for baby names.”  Sherlock is getting gay vibes from the Major Sholto relationship, and the army in general.  (Seriously.  The camera in The Bloody Guardsman case.)  Sherlock remembers John flirting with him.  He remembers John saying the next morning that married men just cheat because marriage is boring, apparently, and Sherlock knows John isn’t cut out for domestic life.

Thus: the connection is made somewhere in his brain that John was in love with him and lied about it the whole time.

This sets Sherlock off into a panic.  Remember: he couldn’t even believe John considered him a best friend.  How does Sherlock feel about this?  That’s when he works through his sexual identity, throws off Mycroft as a representative of the idea that caring is not an advantage, and declares that it’s always John Watson.  This makes sense, because we know from A Scandal in Belgravia that Sherlock did not realize that both Molly and Irene were in love with him because he didn’t think that it was possible for someone to be in love with him.  Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t bother working through his sexual and romantic issues unless he’d deduced that someone was in love with him first and the idea appealed to him for once.

Consciously, though, he still thinks he’s solving a murder.

The lying angle is referenced again outside Sholto’s room with “delayed action stabbing: all the time in the world to create an alibi” — Mary is John’s alibi for hiding his feelings for Sherlock.  (John’s previous girlfriends were alibis, too, which is why John couldn’t keep track of who was who in A Scandal in Belgravia.)  Once the literal case is solved and Major Sholto declares that he and Sherlock are alike, I think that’s when the romantic epiphany consciously sets in for Sherlock.

That’s why I don’t understand readings that assert John isn’t consciously aware of his feelings.  For one, Mycroft said it was an intentionally planned lie to hide one’s identity, not a lack of awareness.  Past that, I always thought John absolutely knew he was attracted to Sherlock from the first episode, and consciously knew he was in love with him from the pool scene forward.  In  A Scandal in Belgravia John began his struggle with telling himself it was never going to happen, as I outlined.  And he continues that struggle through series 3.

Repression can explain some things, but conscious attraction explains everything.  Repression doesn’t explain why John is so forthcoming bringing up the conversation Sherlock overheard at the power station.  Repression is also a less direct explanation for why John looks so grim at the beginning of his stag night: why wouldn’t he be happy to see Sherlock?  Sherlock isn’t a dick to him anymore.  We see later on in the night that John does like drinking and spending time with him.  It’s my reading that John didn’t know what it meant that Sherlock was acting like a human being lately, and Sherlock had been waltzing with him, and he needed that answered because he was having second thoughts about getting married.  When the stag night begins, John’s torn between bringing it up and putting Sherlock off, or bringing it up and fucking Sherlock, and the idea that it shouldn’t matter because he’s getting married and it’s shitty to hurt Mary when she got him through the past year.

Yes, I’m actually saying that John was consciously ready to cheat if Sherlock was willing, which before that episode I would have NEVER suspected John would do.  But series 3 made it much clearer to me how badly John wants Sherlock.  John doesn’t feel great about it, but there it is.  We know he has a complex, anguished inner life.

(We have other evidence that John has consciously felt in need of an answer and has been looking at an opening: the fact that he gets them both drunk at all; that he puts Sherlock’s name on Sherlock’s head; on the bench he switches from the topic of Sholto to the idea that Mary and Sherlock are the only two people who have ever turned his life around — and does so with the cryptic segue “changing the topic entirely” in order to allow for plausible deniability if it goes poorly.  Which, we know from previous episodes is how John always approaches telling someone he’s attracted to them: he teases them out first, then goes in for the kill quickly if he gets a positive signal.)

At the start of His Last Vow John has known how he feels about Sherlock for four or five years or whatever the timeline is, and that’s why he hasn’t been seeing Sherlock even though he wants to.  Sherlock said things to him at his wedding he never expected to hear from Sherlock and it’s driving him crazy.  That’s why in His Last Vow he keeps telling himself that Sherlock is a sociopath that doesn’t care about people even though we know John knows better.  It’s like he’s purposely deleting Sherlock’s whole best man speech.  There’s no reason for John to do that unless he’s torturing himself with it.

It’s harder to imagine that a repressed guy would avoid Sherlock for a month.  As far as John knows at the start of the episode, either his feelings for Sherlock are 1) requited, which he isn’t the least bit sure about, but would be a threat to his marriage and future family life because John knows he would be on that immediately, or 2) his feelings for Sherlock are unrequited, and it’s too painful for him to be around Sherlock because Sherlock acts so in love with John that it gives John false (or so he thinks) hope.

Remember, John has been pining after him for four or five years now.  He saw Sherlock die, still thought he was a straight sociopath and it didn’t make a difference to his feelings, and then Sherlock came back to life even better than expected.  John is going nuts.  Absolutely nuts.  He has a wife and child and he’s desperate to quit feeling things for Sherlock at this point.  He needs to be able to keep Sherlock in his life as a friend but he’s having trouble doing that when His Last Vow starts because he’s been in love with him for too long.

I suppose anything is possible, but I feel a repressed guy would keep giving in to the urge to see Sherlock and just feel hazily conflicted every time without knowing why.  A guy who consciously knows he’s attracted would consciously avoid Sherlock, though.

As His Last Vow goes on, though, the message John is getting from Sherlock is that Sherlock is straight, that Sherlock clearly can’t do relationships if he fake proposes to people and calls love a “human error,” that Sherlock doesn’t have feelings for John if he’s pushing him and Mary back together, and that he shot Magnussen for Mary if anyone —  Sherlock literally only says, “Give my love to Mary.  Tell her she’s safe now.”  Sherlock never says he did it for John.  It should be obvious he did it for John — but when you’re John Watson, right then, you’ve convinced yourself Sherlock is a straight sociopath, so it isn’t obvious to John.  John can’t make sense of anything because he’s done letting himself believe Sherlock could feel anything for him.  It’s too painful to keep contemplating.